Six consequences of Israel’s six-year fight with Turkey

Tourism plummeted, business boomed, Israel’s relations with Cyprus and Greece took off and more.

Israeli marine dropping on board Mavi Marmara 2010

The Mavi Marmara flotilla incident that sent diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel into a tailspin took place six years ago, on May 31, 2010.

Here are six unintended, but significant, consequences of that rupture:

• Tourism plummeted. In 2008, Turkey was the favorite vacation destination for Israelis, who took advantage of all-inclusive packages in areas like Antalya, where Hebrew signs appeared in shops and hotels catered to Israelis. Some 560,000 Israelis, or about 8 percent of the population at the time, vacationed in Turkey that year. In 2009 that number already started to taper off … and then took a complete tumble in 2011, the year after the Mavi Marmara incident, when only 79,000 tourists visited Turkey, an 85% decrease from 2008.

• Business boomed. Despite the breakdown of diplomatic ties, business between the two countries soared.

• Israel served as physical bridge between Turkey and the Gulf. One of the fallouts of the Syrian Civil War was that Turkey, which exports a great deal to Arab countries and the Persian Gulf, could no longer drive overland to Syria and from there to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf countries. It needed an alternative bridge, and found one in Israel.

• Israel’s relations with Cyprus and Greece took off. While ties with Cyprus and Greece had begun to improve considerably even before the Mavi Marmara incident – mainly because of the discovery of the natural gas reserves off of Israel’s coast – ties with both countries took off enormously afterward.
The breakdown of ties with Turkey sent a signal to Cyprus and Greece – both biter historic rivals of Turkey – that Israel would be interested in a significant warming of ties, further proving that well-worn axiom that in the Middle East, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

• Israel’s military cooperation with Romania and Bulgaria received a boost. One of the biggest losses for Israel as a result of the breakdown of ties with Turkey was the loss of the lucrative Turkish weapons market, a market worth billions and billions of dollars. In the immediate wake of the Mavi Marmara, Ankara canceled more than a dozen arms deals with Israel that at the time were reported to have been worth more than $50 billion.

• US Jewish groups began to acknowledge Armenian Genocide. Over the last six years, Jewish groups in the US which in the past had not supported recognizing the Armenian genocide started to do so.

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